Grant the distribute job the permissions it asks for

A reusable workflow can only hold a subset of its caller's permissions.
submit-packages.yml requests `pull-requests: write` to open the PR carrying the
refreshed distribution/ manifests, but release.yml granted only
`contents: write`, so the push would succeed and the PR creation be denied.

The script also swallowed that denial with a bare `||`, reporting success with
no PR behind it. It now distinguishes an already-open PR, which is expected on a
re-run, from a real failure, which exits non-zero. A silent success here is
precisely how this pipeline spent three months looking healthy while publishing
nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

Author: ralyodio

.github/workflows/release.yml

@@ -9,8 +9,14 @@ on:
         description: 'Version to release (e.g. 0.1.0)'
         required: true
 
+# A called workflow can only ever hold a subset of its caller's permissions, so
+# the distribute job's `pull-requests: write` has to be granted here too — it
+# opens the PR carrying the refreshed distribution/ manifests. Without this the
+# push succeeds and `gh pr create` is denied, which the script swallows, so the
+# branch would appear with no PR behind it.
 permissions:
   contents: write
+  pull-requests: write
 
 jobs:
   # 1) Create the GitHub Release (draft) up front so each per-platform build job

scripts/open-distribution-pr.sh

@@ -37,13 +37,29 @@ else
   git push origin "${BRANCH}"
 fi
 
-# `gh pr create` fails if one is already open for the branch, which is fine.
-gh pr create \
+# An already-open PR for this branch is fine and expected on a re-run. Anything
+# else — a denied token, a missing base — is a real failure and must not be
+# swallowed: a silent success here is precisely how this pipeline went three
+# months looking healthy while publishing nothing.
+set +e
+OUT="$(gh pr create \
   --base main \
   --head "${BRANCH}" \
   --title "chore(distribution): refresh manifests for v${VERSION}" \
   --body "Automated manifest refresh from the release pipeline for v${VERSION}.
 
 Version strings and sha256 checksums are rewritten from the published release
-assets by \`scripts/submit-packages.mjs\`." \
-  || echo "a PR for ${BRANCH} already exists; branch updated in place"
+assets by \`scripts/submit-packages.mjs\`." 2>&1)"
+RC=$?
+set -e
+
+echo "${OUT}"
+
+if [ "${RC}" -ne 0 ]; then
+  if echo "${OUT}" | grep -qi "already exists"; then
+    echo "a PR for ${BRANCH} already exists; branch updated in place"
+  else
+    echo "gh pr create failed for ${BRANCH}" >&2
+    exit "${RC}"
+  fi
+fi